From Darkness into Light
by Merlynnod
Summary: Frodo gets his happy ending. ;) AU story in which Frodo does not leave for the Gray Havens, and instead learns to truly live again.
1. Introductions and Author Notes

This is the first of what I hope to be a continuing cycle of drabbly-type things for LOTR. ( All stories are pulled from both Book Canon and Movie Canon, and my own, strange but happy little universe. ( I need happy endings. I just do. ;) Tolkien gave them the sad, bittersweet and beautiful ending...now I'm going to do my part to give them the happy life they *should* have been allowed to have! ;) I can't change life, but I can write alternate endings. ( I decided a long time ago, that life isn't always easy, and it's not often fair or happy...and it became very important to me to have "happy endings", or "and life wasn't perfect, but it was darn well pretty fine" endings in my stories. (  
  
I felt that by Frodo never being able to recover at least enough to enjoy his life, that, in the end, Sauron won, in a way...the Evil was allowed to conquer, or at least overshadow, despite its discontinued existence. That bothered me...a lot. Because of that, and because I'm a sucker for a happy ending, I started imagining a life in which Frodo came back to the Shire, and through the love and attention of his friends and family; and the intense wholesomeness of where he was, Frodo was able to recover to some degree. Hey, if Sam could have his Rosie...why couldn't Frodo have his own Mistress Baggins? NO! WAIT! It's not a Mary Sue...I promise! I *hate* those things! And I swore I'd never write one. ( So far, I've been successful...and it's been a few years now. ( Give me a chance....please?!?  
  
I pulled Melilot from the family trees in the back of ROTK...she doesn't have a birth date or any parents listed, just her name on a side portion of the Brandybuck line. Tolkien created her, and I took the liberty to fill her out a bit. I decided that if Frodo was going to stay in the Shire, he'd have to find something...or someone...to stay for. As such, Melilot came into the picture after some research. From her...well...the rest is in the stories. (  
  
In my world, Frodo still suffers occasionally from his journey, and the scars are still there, ever present reminders of what had been, and what could still be. The Ring would have left its mark...to simply say that "and they all lived happily ever after" is just plain silly. It's not realistic, and honestly would cheapen everything Tolkien worked so hard to create for the world. But, in this universe, the anniversary illnesses begin to fade with time and love, and life takes on a new and brighter quality. All the more precious for what was once thought lost and gone forever. I wanted to give Frodo a second chance, another story wherein he gets his happy ending, and no one has to "leave behind what they most love in order to save it." (paraphrase from ROTK for those who don't know. ( ) I dearly hope that Tolkein would approve. ( 


	2. Darkness into Light

I do not own Middle Earth, nor any of the characters or places mentioned in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in his incredible stories. I am not making any money off of these stories, they are written purely for pleasure, and the intellectual idea of alternate endings. ( I promise to bring the "boys" home in time for supper, none the worse for wear after our little adventures. (  
  
Luminous blue eyes shone in the moonlight that streamed from a nearby window, a thin and hauntingly elegant gentlehobbit lay sprawled on a chair below the window. He was alone, alone at Bag End, just as he had been after Bilbo left, just as he was before the Quest. But now, now so much was different, so much had changed. Almost without conscious thought, he glanced down at his four-fingered hand, grimacing slightly at the rudely ended stump there where his forefinger used to be. Gone now, gone like so much else he once held dear.  
  
Lost...lost forever and always...  
  
Before he could stop himself, he sunk back into the dream that was not a dream, the nightmare that was truly not a fantasy but a memory. A memory of a dark time, a desperate time. Hot, burning, fiery, and so much pain...so easy just to let go, to release his grip...he never expected to return anyway, why should he even bother to listen to...Sam...Sam is calling, Sam is pleading, no, not pleading...Demanding. Sam is demanding that he lift up his arm and live. No matter the cost, Sam is determined to save his master one final time.  
  
And without thinking, he feels his aching, wrenching body slowly pulling itself upward...then being half-pushed, half carried out into the slightly cooler air outside the Mountain of Doom.  
  
The gentlehobbit truly awoke this time with a start, breathing labored and clutching a small, white jewel around his neck. The Evenstar's pendant. Even now, when the pain and longing are little more than an aching memory, he wears the star, as a memory, an heirloom of a terrible journey...but one that somehow came right in the end. A reminder that there are happy endings, and that some choices, though difficult, are worth the cost of making. Looking about him, he is at home, home in his study at Bag End, and around him he can see the familiar sights of all he holds dear in that Middle-Earth. On the mantle is a diminutive earthenware jar, made by two small, perfect hands, a child's gift to him for Yule. To keep his quill nibs in.  
  
On the windowsill, a small blue water jug, filled with recently gathered wildflowers the first of the new spring season. He recalls the giggles and secrets shared between two young lasses as those flowers were gathered on an afternoon not long ago.  
  
A discarded hair ribbon lies to one side of the blotter, left there the day before in the hurry to wash up for supper.  
  
And on the desk before him, the shaky but determined copying of the alphabet, a few small words neatly lined up along the bottom of the page.  
  
Prim Dilly Da Mum  
  
Not lost. Not forever and always.  
  
He has so much now...so many things he had never thought possible...his sweet lasses, more than he had ever hoped for, even before the Quest took so much from him.  
  
His sweet little Primula, Prim to all who know her well. Porcelain fair skin and black-brown curls, huge morning-glory blue eyes, always shining, always laughing...her eyes are that of his mother's, her namesake... Her manner so bright and bubbling; like a brook in spring.  
  
Daffodil, or Dilly, still so young and tiny, only just beginning to grasp and hold onto the things around her, smiling every now and again that soft baby smile. Her eyes dark chocolate brown like her mother, her baby fine curls chestnut in color, still wispy and ethereal in a light halo around her head.  
  
And finally, the tiny oil portrait of Melilot...  
  
Just before the Quest she had been so young, hardly more than a lass, but so sweet, so quiet and shy. It had often seemed that she had been the only lass in the Shire who didn't treat him as either the "Next Mad Baggins" or as an eligible bachelor gentlehobbit. The change had been refreshing in its way...but then the Ring had come to him, and all that the Quest had taken and scarred and left him broken with...and he had no thoughts of anything but dark times, the feeling of the shadows always just waiting to swallow him into their deep and stinking abyss...But into that dark sweet Melilot had come, a childhood friend of Rosie Cotton's, the dear Mistress Rose, Sam's Rosie.  
  
Rosie had brought Meli with her to visit one afternoon and a year later the unlikely pair of Baggins and Brandybuck were wed. Mad Baggins of the Nine Fingers had taken a bride, and a lovely lass she was too, even if she was a bit too quiet and bookish for most Hobbit standards. Melilot had dark auburn hair, a most unusual color in the shire, with a peaches and cream complexion to offset her chocolate brown eyes.  
  
She had grown up since he had been gone, more certain of herself, but still with that child-like wonder and innocence that was so a part of her personality. Where before she had been shy to the point of it being painful to watch her interact with other hobbits, she seemed to have finally grown out of her timidity, though she was still quiet, and preferred her family's company to that of parties or pubs. All of which made the pair more suited to each other, for above all else, Melilot instilled a protective feeling in Frodo. For the first time in his life, he was the one doing the protecting, and the change was a welcome one. A gentle lass, sweet, quiet and shy, and although it might turn a more sensible hobbit's attentions away from her, Frodo found joy and comfort in her silly word games, stories, and intense interest in books.  
  
"Yes, but it was her laughter that caught me...even so many years ago...It just took so long to realize...quick and bubbling, infectious...lending an innocence to her, like a trusting child...such a complete opposite to the horrors I had seen and felt and known" Frodo murmured half aloud. To the Ringbearer, Melilot and the children they would have together become a living embodiment of all he had given so much to save. Much in the same way Rosie had been for dear Sam. It often struck Frodo as surprising that the same beautiful hobbit lass who had saved Sam, had indirectly also saved himself through the casual introduction of shy Melilot Brandybuck.  
  
Looking around his darkened study, the candle that had once lightened the darkness having finally guttered sometime before; Frodo was struck again at what he had found after the darkness. Through all the pain, the sickness, the interminable days and the torturous nights...he had never expected to sit in beautiful Bag End, finally alive with the sounds of the children it had waited so long to house once more. It was nothing short of a gift from the Valar, and Frodo was wise enough to value his good fortune.  
  
Getting up from his chair, well aware that even silly Meli would scold him in the morning for falling asleep at his books once again; he halted briefly before the half opened door, the room next to the one he and Meli shared. Inside, two small children slept, Prim's dark curls a halo around her angelic sleeping face, a smile of pleasant dreams gracing her delicate features. And still tiny Dilly, asleep in her crib along the wall, thumb in her mouth, sucking contentedly as she dreamed. Reaching out with his maimed right hand, Frodo gently smoothed back the curls from the sleeping infant's forehead, his touch as gentle as a summer breeze, feeling the beautifully alive warmth of the child. Smiling to himself, a true smile, one that reached all the way to his eyes and seemed to shine out from his very soul; pulled at his features as he watched his two precious daughters sleep, safe in a world without darkness. Without fear. And without an evil so powerful as to obliterate all that was once good and whole and pure.  
  
A time when his daughters might know a world of light and laughter, of love and peace and joy. They would never have to know of what he and the others in the Fellowship had seen. They would have the life that should have been for Pippin, Merry, Sam...even himself.  
  
Frodo would be forever grateful to the three sleeping lasses he held so dear to his heart. They had pulled him from the brink of giving in to the darkness that seemed so deep, so strong and tight. They had given him the desire that even strong but gentle Sam had been unable to accomplish. He had protected their future, and they had provided him with a reason to see that future first hand.  
  
From so much darkness...so much light had been given. 


	3. Lullaby

"Lay down,  
  
your sweet and weary head,  
  
Night is falling,  
  
You have come to journey's end,  
  
Sleep now -- dream of the ones who came before..."  
  
A scene so commonplace in the world as to be nothing more than ordinary was unfolding in a small, but bright and cheery bedroom towards the back of Bag End.  
  
"And all will turn to silver glass,  
  
A light on the water,  
  
Gray ships pass  
  
Into the west..."  
  
A pretty hobbit lass was singing a soft and wistful lullaby to a tiny child with large, but sleepy blue eyes, and dark brown curls framing her porcelain face. The child was very nearly asleep, and her mother's tone was becoming softer as the lass nodded.  
  
Unaware to both mother and nearly sleeping child, another was watching the scene in the bedroom, his expressive blue eyes, so very much like his small daughter's, unusually bright with unshed tears. He stood, silent and still, simply watching them in their simple, everyday tableau...a picture he had never dreamed to see...  
  
Closing his eyes, drifting away to the soft crooning of the lullaby, the gentlehobbit began to imagine, and to remember.  
  
Another bedroom, another mother, the hobbit mistress the very picture of the child in the current bed, but older, married and with a son of her own. Frodo could see himself, curled up in his bed at Brandy Hall, blankets tucked up beneath his chin, trying so very hard to stay awake...His mother seated next to him, softly telling him a story he could not later recall, one full of wonder and magic and elves. With little hobbit lads who save the day.  
  
A scene in this same bedroom, this time the child was himself, securely tucked into the same bed; a much-loved and achingly familiar form sitting in a chair alongside. Bilbo was reading from a text he had translated from the Elvish Quenya, one of the many stories of Beren and Luthien Tinuviel, still one of Frodo's favorite stories. How often he had been lulled to sleep by that gentle but laughing voice in his boyhood...he could almost hear Bilbo's soft words, so close and yet so far away now...  
  
And then the dream-like image faded away, the mists of the mind forming a barrier the gentle-hobbit was forced to struggle through to view what lay beyond.  
  
To his surprise, and yet then again not...his cerulean blue eyes were met with a scene he hadn't dared hope to ever even imagine...He was sitting next to another bed, one smaller than the one currently occupying that room, but somehow familiar just the same. A very young lad lay in the center of it, snuggly wrapped in blankets and looking very small with the large pillows behind his dark brown curls. His eyes were the same impossible blue as the lass currently being sung to sleep by her mother, but with another's features also...The child couldn't have been more than four or five, and was quickly being overtaken by sleep. But the biggest surprise to the dreamer was the hobbit sitting in a familiar chair next to the bed. It was himself, several years from that time, dark curls turned almost all to silver, only a few dark hairs still left to proclaim their original color. He was smiling softly to himself, gently singing the same sweetly sad lullaby he could still hear coming from the mother and daughter scene still before him. Somehow, the gentlehobbit knew that this was not his own son, but rather a grandlad, a child of the lass so young and tender now, but someday to grow up, marry, and begin her own life, with her own family.  
  
And he would be there. Not only would he live to see his own children grow up, he would be there to read and sing and watch his children's children...not in his wildest imaginings had he ever imagined he would be granted such a gift. Such a precious thing...  
  
"What can you see  
  
On the horizon?  
  
Why do the white gulls call?"  
  
("Into The West" by Fran Walsh, Howard Shore, and Annie Lennox, ROTK, New Line Cinema, Peter Jackson) 


	4. First Meetings

"I can still remember the first time I saw you...but I had no idea it was you I was looking at...seems to always be the case..." a middle-aged hobbit said half to himself as he looked down at his sleeping daughter. The child was only a few days old, with fair complexion and dark brown locks, and beneath her peacefully closed eyelids, her eyes were the exact shade of impossible blue of her father's eyes.  
  
The elegant gentlehobbit was seated next to a frilly white bassinet, the morning sun just beginning to color the clouds in friendly hues of red and violet. His sleeping daughter lay within, her new parents enjoying a rare peaceful moment. He had been at her side since the wan hour before dawn, watching her sleep, wondering at how her tiny presence could create so much light where before only darkness had existed.  
  
Reaching out slowly, he carefully brushed her cheek with his maimed right hand, wondering at the smoothness of her infant features, the bright blossom in her cheeks, the warmth of her skin, the peaceful countenance she radiated while wandering the land of nod. Smiling to himself, he continued on with his half whispered narrative.  
  
"I remember your face...from another time and place, but it was you all the same. I had seen your mother for the first time, she was only twenty then, and I was forty...just a bit beyond my coming of age, and your mother still a bonny lass, but so quiet and shy, bookish they called her. It was the mid- summer party, held out beneath the party tree. Bilbo had not been gone long to Rivendell at that point, and I was lonely here at Bag End by myself, though I didn't truly realize it at the time.  
  
Meli was dressed in a blue summer dress, just the color of the sky overhead, that fantastic shade that only happens in the spring and fall, and every now and again in the middle of summer...That blue that is just so beautiful it almost hurts to look at it, filled with scudding white clouds. Bilbo always said that the Valar were smiling on those days, and that's what made everything look so bright and wonderful. Perhaps he was right...those days always seem to be the best in living memory after all. You were born under a sky of that color, Rose and Sam were married on a day just like that...as were your mother and myself. Now where was I in this story? Oh, I remember...  
  
I had escaped the energy of the party for a few moments up to Bag End, slipping away quietly while I had hoped no one was paying attention. It seemed that as the new Master of Bag End, I was constantly having enquiries into my social engagements with pretty young lasses...and even those who were not so young, nor so pretty. But I shouldn't say such things, it isn't nice," here the gentlehobbit laughed to himself, remembering some of the more interesting tea times he had spent with "third cousins twice removed on his mother's side, who also happen to be wonderful cooks and very eager for a nice match..." He did not miss those days in the slightest.  
  
I spent a little time alone in the kitchen, simply enjoying the relative peace of the quiet smial, when I was startled by a timid knock at the front door. I had apparently been spotted after all, or so I thought to myself. Sighing, I got up, thinking that I was probably answering to Merry or Pippin, possibly even Sam. I had not expected to open the door to a hobbit lass I had never formally met. Your mother I had seen grow up vaguely, as she was a part of the Shire happenings, and as you will learn, my love, everyone knows everyone else here in this beautiful countryside. Melilot was a distant relation of Bilbo's and moreso to Merry, so in some far-off fashion we were cousins, and I could remember her vaguely as a small lass at family gatherings for Yule and such at Brandy Hall. I had not seen her in some years, and was surprised to realize that the painfully shy young lass I had once bandaged a scraped knee for, had become a pretty hobbit lass now into her tweens.  
  
So there she stood on my doorstep, auburn curls spilling haphazardly from beneath a large sunhat, sky blue dress soaked dark with water and some mud up her left side nearly to her hip. She smiled apologetically, and flitted her eyes downward, obviously embarrassed to be seen in such a state. I smiled and welcomed her into the smial, hoping to put her at ease. She was hesitant at first, but soon overcame herself in her desire to attempt to clean up as best she could. The journey back to Brandy Hall would not be for some hours, and she did not particularly wish to stay wet and muddy for the remainder of the afternoon. Soon her dress was as clean as we could make it, and we found ourselves seated in the kitchen with two glasses of strawberry cordial. She had finally started to seem a bit more at ease, and I asked her what had happened to wet her so. The explanation involved a very much younger cousin, a frog, a nearby stream, and said younger cousin leaping into said stream after said frog. The rest of the story followed to the obvious conclusion. Which also lead us up to her appearance at my doorstep, wet, muddy, and embarrassed. We sat talking for most of the afternoon, until we were roused from our pleasant conversation by the sound of the front door swinging open, and two familiar voices calling our names. Merry and Pippin had evidently noticed our absence, and come looking for us.  
  
Later that night, after the festivities had reached their end, the clean-up begun and mostly completed, and the stars high overhead; I had finally dressed for bed and had just fallen into an easy slumber. The dreams started when I was very, very young, and though I don't often talk about them, continue even now. I dreamed of a very long journey, with great hardship and pain. I dreamed of a place where nothing green had ever been since the beginning of mortal memory, a land of fire and stone and black, filthy horror all around. But then the dream turned to more pleasant things, but still tinged with sadness and pain. I dreamed of the Shire as it would be, of Sam and Rosie and many, many children that were so obviously theirs that I smiled to think of their happiness. But then, to my surprise, I found myself here at Bag End, seated in the study that had been Bilbo's, and later my own. I was older then, with gray beginning to take hold in the curls above my ears and at my forehead. I was seated at the old writing desk, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth as I scribbled something in a blue leather-bound book. The quill in my hand was moving along at a great pace, as if I was eager to finish what I was doing. Then, in the dream, I suddenly looked startled, and quickly closed the book and pulled a parchment closer, pretending to be in deep thought over what few words had been scrawled upon it. And then I saw you, as a little lass, coming up behind my chair and pulling at my weskit for my attention. It would seem that you were not supposed to see what I was so busily composing there in the blue book. A tale of dragons and white horses I do believe it was. A birthday gift for you I think, in another few years. Looking down, I was then treated to my first true sight of you, in all your child splendor. Your complexion was very fair, much like mine and your mother's, but with your mother's bright cheeks and round, smiling face. Your eyes were large and bright blue, fringed with long, dark lashes, so much as I remember my own mother's eyes. Your hair was dark brown like my own, nearly black, tied back with a large blue ribbon, the curls falling around your shoulders. You smiled up at me, that sweet, innocent child smile that radiates so much love in such a simple gesture. You seemed to be asking me something, and I lifted you up into my lap and we seemed to be talking, your head laid back against my shoulder, eyes bright and interested. And there the dream faded away into nothingness...but I knew that I had seen my daughter, mine and Melilot's. I didn't know how or when this future might occur, but I knew it would bring me strength during that time of molten heat and evil darkness pervading all. There would be light at the end of that journey, somewhere on the far side."  
  
The dark haired hobbit smoothed the downy coverlet, and laid his hand over the steady rhythm of the tiny chest beneath his palm. Smiling down at her still form, wondering what dreams and adventures, journeys and exploits might be yet to come for his small daughter. 


End file.
